THE SETTING
was in this position.1 The holdings varied from a
hundred to two hundred acres, down to those of the
cottager with his four or five. Some of these small-
holders had to pay dues to the squire, but so long as they
did so they could not be dispossessed. By 1714 this state
of affairs was already becoming a memory, and the rich
were getting richer while the poor were getting poorer.
To quote Mr. Evan John once again:
"The physical presence of the poor (except of those
trained and adorned for domestic serfdom) grew
distasteful to the rich man, whose ancestors had eaten
and made merry at the long board of the Elizabethan
manor."2
The eighteenth century was to see the completion of the
process by which the rich became masters of the land;
but the Enclosure Acts were only the logical results of
the victory of the vested interests over the nation, as
represented by the monarchy, in the Civil War and at
the Revolution. Once the rich had been checked by
the Prerogative Courts such as the Star Chamber and the
Council for the North,3 but now the same people made
the laws as M.P.s, and administered them as J.P.s. It
was becoming impossible for the poor to obtain justice
at all when they came into conflict with those who
governed the country, and this explains why Jacobitism
drew so much of its strength from what are now called
the working classes.4
1 cf. Belloc, H.: Charles the First, p. 24; also Jerrold, D.: England, pp. 65-66.
2 Op. cit., p. 72
3 These were far from being the organs of oppression the Whig hiatorian would
have us believe; cf. Reid, R. R.: The King's Council for the North, passim.
4 Bates, C. J.: History of Northumberland, pp. 265-266: "The attachment of
the working classes to the Stuart cause was much deeper than might now be
supposed."
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